For years, Pat Smith has lived in the public eye alongside one of the biggest names in NFL history. As the former wife of Dallas Cowboys legend Emmitt Smith, Pat was often introduced through her relationship with the Pro Football Hall of Famer, even as she built a career and identity of her own.
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Now, through her Pursue YOU podcast, Smith has been taking a much more personal look at what it meant to spend years being defined by the roles she played as a wife, mother, and public figure.
The latest episode of Pursue YOU, titled “Finding Yourself Again at 55: Rediscovering Who You Are Beyond the Roles You’ve Played,” explored her feeling invisible despite being part of high-profile marriages and her desire to be known simply as Pat rather than through the identity of someone’s wife.
It was while discussing that feeling that Smith recalled an experience at one Super Bowl involving the enormous attention surrounding her then-husband.
“At one Super Bowl, I was about to get knocked over with a bunch of dudes who were just trying to get over to my husband (Emmitt Smith) at the time,” said Pat on season two of Pursue YOU. “I really felt unseen, insignificant, just ignored, disrespected.”
For Smith, however, the memory appears to be part of a much larger identity struggle rather than simply a complaint about one Super Bowl. In July, on an earlier episode of the same podcast, she discussed reaching a point in her life where the familiar roles she had built her identity around began falling away.
In the podcast, she described that period as one marked by identity loss, shame, isolation, and the challenge of figuring out who she was without the titles attached to her.
The former Miss Virginia USA married Emmitt Smith in 2000 after dating for three years. Later, in an interview with Essence in 2016, Pat explained that she had spent years putting her own career ambitions aside while supporting Emmitt and raising their family. She had pursued television and acting before moving to Dallas, but following her marriage, she no longer knew who she was.
“Of course, Emmitt and I got married in 2000, we dated 3 years before that so probably about 7 or 8 years down the road of the journey I started feeling different than I did at the beginning,” said Pat when asked about her thoughts on being a wife of an NFL megastar for over a decade.
“At first it was exciting; it was fun. Of course, I love cheering my husband on every week. I miss that excitement but after about 7 years, 8 years, you start to go, ‘Well, what happened to me? Who am I?’ I was always that little girl who had my own dreams and things that I wanted to accomplish.”
Her marriage to Emmitt eventually ended after two decades. The couple announced their separation in August 2020, months after celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary. They said at the time that they intended to continue moving forward with love and compassion as co-parents and friends. They share three children, while their blended family includes five children in total.
Now, Pat Smith’s focus has shifted toward understanding herself outside those relationships and roles. Her Pursue YOU conversations repeatedly return to identity, self-worth, and the importance of being seen as an individual. The Super Bowl memory, therefore, provides a glimpse into the experience behind a subject she has spent much of 2026 openly exploring: what it means to find yourself after years of being known primarily in relation to someone else.